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How many hours to read a language? | ||
Tags: Reading | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| CelticBasque Newbie United States Joined 4583 days ago 18 posts - 20 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, French | Message 1 of 10 22 February 2015 at 8:57pm | IP Logged |
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Obviously to some people, this is going to sound like a stupid question. (It may sound a bit less idiotic after I give a
little background). I'm applying to graduate schools for history and each school has specific requirements for each type of history. (E.g. Ancient history = Latin, Ancient Greek, French, and German. Modern European History = French and German. etc.) Basically, if I have 4 years to be a college student and help get a headstart on languages before the language exams, I need to know which are possible to pass in the time between now and then. So it really is of the utmost importance how long it takes to read. I'm not looking for pinpoint accurate answers. But general ones. FSI says that Russian takes 1,100 class hours and obviously that differs depending on the individual and the strategy etc., but it certainly helps one see that its quite a bit harder than french 575-600 hours. For each language, how long do you think it would take to be able to read well (newspapers, books, etc.) but with a dictionary. I already have experience in Russian, French, Latin, and Italian and I have a pretty good aptitude for learning languages in general. These are the languages I'm interested in, but any estimates for other languages would be nice too. Mandarin Japanese French Russian German 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4522 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes  Studies: German | Message 2 of 10 22 February 2015 at 10:05pm | IP Logged |
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I have taken a mostly input based approach to learning German (i.e., lots of reading and watching of films).
Rather than talk about hours, it's probably better to talk about words/pages of text, since everyone reads at somewhat different rates. I am now at about 22000 pages of German. I would put myself at low-C1 level for reading. I can read a standard novel without difficultly without a dictionary. At 10000 pages I was somewhere in the B2 stage. That's not to say that I can read any newspaper easily (I struggle a bit with the German equivalent to the New York Times, for instance). I quite comfortably read 10000 pages a year (30/pages a day). So to get to my current level took 2.5 years. What is perhaps really important to realise is that you don't need anywhere as complete an understanding of a language's grammar for receptive purposes as opposed to production, which means you can start reading pretty soon. The thing that will hold you up is a sufficient vocabulary - but if you have somewhere between 1000-3000 words you can start reading novels. With the proviso that languages that are more distant from English are going to offer less of a cognate discount, so may require a larger vocabulary to easily pickup a book and start reading. Just use a Kindle with a pop-up dictionary (I recommend the discontinued one's with cursors, rather than touchscreens, which you can still pickup on Ebay for about $50). Reading comprehension will come from reading, not from classes, so the sooner you start reading the better. Edited by patrickwilken on 22 February 2015 at 10:10pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| CelticBasque Newbie United States Joined 4583 days ago 18 posts - 20 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, French | Message 3 of 10 22 February 2015 at 10:46pm | IP Logged |
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Thank you very much, that was a great response. I'm not yet at the level where I can read a book/newspaper article
without having to check vocabulary at couple times each line, but I think like you said, I just need to get my vocab to around 3000 words and then I can start that. (Right now I'm focusing on Russian). The grammar aspect is certainly true, its necessary to know basic grammar rules and constructions, but not the fine details. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6898 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 10 22 February 2015 at 10:54pm | IP Logged |
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Related (and recent) topic:
How long in order to read? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| CelticBasque Newbie United States Joined 4583 days ago 18 posts - 20 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, French | Message 5 of 10 22 February 2015 at 10:57pm | IP Logged |
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thank for the link, Jeff. This is exactly what I was looking for.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| redflag Senior Member Australia Joined 3831 days ago 123 posts - 182 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Danish, Indonesian, French | Message 6 of 10 22 February 2015 at 11:19pm | IP Logged |
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There are also specific books and resources with strategies for learning to read for
academic purposes that theoretically speed up the process from the usual reading while language learning (many universities have courses in it too for graduate students). For instance, German Quickly by April Wilson. Edited by redflag on 22 February 2015 at 11:20pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4938 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 7 of 10 23 February 2015 at 4:37am | IP Logged |
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Do they really expect students to be able to read Ancient Greek, Latin, French, and German???
Most university students have very low proficiencies in the languages they MAJOR in! So how is it that they expect to be reasonably fluent in four? (with enough vocabulary to be able to be productive in reading those languages? It seems like an awful lot to ask. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4433 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 8 of 10 23 February 2015 at 6:02am | IP Logged |
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This sort of question came up at least once already. There is no straightforward answer. In my experience I
started off with Cantonese in Hong Kong. Back then the education system focused on memorizing textbooks, drills and exercises. Even in primary school we had almost 2 hours of homework every night. And to keep up academically parents would hire private tutors or sent kids to tutors for additional instructions. We just didn't have time to visit the local library or read anything outside the school curriculum. The ones who did regularly were thought of as not being focus on their studies. After moving to Canada I started reading articles from a subscription of the Chinese edition of the Reader's Digest. I received Chinese instructions only up to the primary school level but picked up enough characters to read a newspaper. I know 2 people who studied Chinese up to the high school level but have completely lost the ability to read anything from the newspaper to a restaurant menu. If you come across an article in the newspaper in a language, how much can you pick up? 2 months ago while I was in Hong Kong, I picked up an article from a local newspaper on the travels of Marco Polo. And on the Internet I found 2 similar articles from English newspapers. The 1 thing I tend to find intimidating in a Chinese newspaper are the foreign names of individuals and place names that get translated into Chinese. Without the original you go by the combination Chinese characters that are supposed to represent foreign names phonetically. If you know a topic well enough, you just need to pick up a few key words and you may be able to guess what the rest of the text says. There may be a news report you heard a few hours earlier in English regarding a plane crash in Taiwan. Then you listen to the same report in Chinese you tend to pick up more. Even if you don't know half the words & phrases, the fact that you heard the same piece of news in a familiar language you can sort of guess what the news reporter was referring to. A novel tends to be more abstract. But you can pick up the content in magazine with lots of photos easily. Like in a Chinese magazine there is a photo of a European looking city. Even without knowing the place name, you come to the conclusion this is in the travel section and the town / city is in Europe. And further down the page are photos of food and next to these the € symbol followed by numbers. You come to the conclusion that the magazine is referring to a local restaurant in Europe where the Euro is used. In the beginning of learning a new language even when reading is a challenge, getting the content depends on how much effort you want to spend looking up words in a dictionary. A while ago someone in my workplace asked me to translate an article that was in a local Chinese newspaper back to English. For people who have no experience with Chinese characters or a foreign script, looking up the dictionary can be next to impossible. But if you stick to German, Italian, French, etc. that use the Latin alphabet, you can look up every word easily. Looking up words & phrases in Chinese tend to be more tedious. If you know how to pronounce a word / phrase phonetically but don't know the character, you can easily type in the phonetics with the Latin alphabet (Pinyin) and find the character easily. If come across a character you don't know, you can look it up by radical which takes slightly longer. Edited by shk00design on 23 February 2015 at 6:08am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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